Dr. Ara Nefian
NASA , USA

Dr. Ara Nefian is a Senior Scientist at SGT, NASA Ames Research Center. His general interest are in the areas of computer vision, machine learning and robotics. Ara led the Lunar Mapping and Modeling from Apollo era imagery and was the principal investigator for the Lunar Albedo Reconstruction project. Since 2012 he led the rover navigation team in supporting NASA future robotics Lunar mission and is a collaborator on the science team for Mars Curiosity rover mission.

In the past he was with Intel Research Labs in Santa Clara, CA involved in several projects including us of the Bayesian networks for face and gesture recognition, audio-visual speech processing, web image clustering and bioinformatics. In 2005 Dr. Nefian was part of the computer vision group within the Stanford racing team (Stanley) that won the DARPA Autonomous Navigation Grand Challenge. He co-authored more than 100 research papers and holds ten US and international patents. Ara Nefian holds a BS from Politehnica University Bucharest (1993) and a MSEE and PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology (1999). Ara is also CTO of Intelinair, a leading company in aerial image processing for precision agriculture.